Good news, bad news. First the good: The United States moved up two places in the global broadband speed rankings, according to Akamai’s latest State of the Internet report out today. Bad news: We’re still only 33rd when it comes to percentage of broadband connections above 2Mbps.

Switzerland ranked first in terms of top-tier connections, with 92% being above the 2Mbps level, while the US scored only 63%. Among the countries ahead of us: Slovakia, South Korea, Romania, and Monaco. Poor Tunisia, which ranked first in the last report, fell out of the top 10 after an 18% decline.

Since it is probably not an option to become an expatriate just to get faster broadband, your next best option is to move to the East Coast, which dominates the top 10 states with the best internet connectivity. Number one is Delaware with 62% of connections above 5Mbps, followed up by New Hampshire (must be all the political pull from the Presidential Primaries) at 59%, a 5.1% increase over last quarter. New York, Nevada, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Oklahoma and Maine, round out the top ten.

Washington, DC has the dual distinction of being one of the slowest states as well, and not because of the pace of congressional legislation. It, along with Alaska and Missouri, rank as the top three for states with the most narrowband connections (those below 256 Kbps).

Overall, Akamai predicts that broadband penetration on the high-end (above 25Mbps) should continue to increase with the roll out of Fibre-to-the-Home technologies and more widespread adoption of the DOCSIS 3.0 specification by cable companies. Of course, if your total bandwidth usage is capped, you’ll just hit your monthly quota faster.

Akamai builds its State of the Internet reports based on data pulled from connections to its global network. Among other findings:

Things don’t look quite as bleak for the US when it comes to average connection speed. We still rank only 18th with an average speed of 4.2Mbps, but that’s well above the global average of 1.7Mbps. South Korea ranks first at a blazing 11 Mbps.

When it comes to unique IP addresses, the US is by far number one with 116,189,177 IP addresses. China is far back at number two, with a paltry 44,568,139 unique IP addresses.

China does have the US beat when it comes to network attack traffic. Over 27% of malicious traffic originated from China. But don’t go bragging, the US generates just over 22% of bad packets.

Nearly two-thirds of attack traffic was targeted at port 445, which is Microsoft’s NetBIOS port. Akamai attributes this to the Confiker worm, which was a busy little beaver during the quarter.

The entire report, as well as previous editions, can be downloaded here (registration with some do-you-need-Akamai-services questions required).

 
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